Life cycles - Monarch Butterflies and More

This year 1-O first graders are learning about life cycles - by studying butterflies. ​We stared with some Monarch butterfly eggs.

During the first week of school we started with tiny white eggs which popped into tiny, very hungry caterpillars. Just as it says in Eric Carle says in his book, The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Monarch butterflies eat only milkweed.

Each day we gave our caterpillar fresh milkweed and the caterpillars got bigger and bigger. They are black and white and yellow with lots of tiny legs. Their antenna are black. they appear to have antenna on both ends. This is to confuse predators.

Toward the end of September our caterpillars found a place to latch on and forced a "J" shape with their bodies. They shook and shook and their body transformed into a green chrysalis with a ring of golden at the top. We waited and waited and waited ...

Then one day our Chrysallis stared to turn dark. We were worried. Was it dead? Soon the outer layer became clear like a window and we could see the familiar orange, black and white of a monarch butterfly inside the chrysalis.

Twice we came to school and found a fully developed butterfly flying and resting in their temporary butterfly home, but the last butterfly surprised us by letting us watch him come out of its chrysalis. At first it looked like a very fat bodied insect with tiny wings, but it pumped and pumped its wings and within an hour or so it was a regular looking butterfly resting in the butterfly home.

Not all of the eggs we started with made it to butterflies. As the season went on the milkweed was dryer and dryer. It was not as nutritious as earlier season milkweed. Three of our eggs made it from egg to caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly in our room. As a class we took each of our three butterflies outside and released them. The first went right up in the air and turned south toward Mexico. The other two needed some time to warm their wings and just to the outside, but they too took off. 1-o read a lot of books about Monarch butterflies and found that butterflies that are born at the end of the season are the ones that travel (migrate) to Mexico to find a warm place to stay in the winter and to find a mate and continue the life cycle. We hope they will come back and lay more eggs in East Kingston, New Hampshire.

​Now we are starting a new Unit on Mexico, so we can learn more about the place where our butterflies have gone.

​During our Unit we learned about the parts of an insect. Head, thorax, abdomen, 2 antenna, 6 legs and sometimes 2 wings. We made our own insects.

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We sang songs, made 3-D life cycle models, and colorful butterflies. ​We made paper moths and camouflaged them around the classroom. We learned about honey bee and pumpkin lifecycles.

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